What is online website marketing? (+Action plan)

This #shorts video is best viewed on mobile:

Your website is literally a digital representation of your business. And in many cases, your website IS the business.

Some may call it their digital brand, others call it their online sales maker, and some use it as an online lead generator.

What is online website marketing?
Online website marketing is a set of digital strategies and tactics done on the internet with the intention to: 1)gain a customer, and 2 keep a customer.

Regardless, your website is core.

And whether you are in the plumbing business, fitness, massage, accounting, food or manufacturing, regardless of the business...

There are really only two goals in website marketing:

1. Gain a customer
2. Keep a customer

With that … everyday we are asked,

“How do we drive more traffic to our website?”

And everyday we basically have the same answer:

“Who is buying your product? And why are they buying it?”

After the initial shock of not getting an immediate response about getting traffic from Facebook, Google and Amazon, the facts about the ideal customer profile start to emerge.

And now we can get to work.

You see, now that we have a clear picture of who the customer is - starting with buying habits, demographics, and psychographics - and why they choose you over the ocean of competitors, we can develop our website marketing and advertising plan.

But first, we need to see where we are starting from.

And get super clear on your website marketing data and metrics.

The first important metric we need to look at is:

Current website traffic

This source of information may come from Google Analytics or your hosting provider, and is usually called “visitors” or “pageviews”.For this example we will say:

Visitors = Website traffic

This number of visitors might be 100 visitors, 1,000 visitors, 10,000 visitors or much more.

What’s Your Conversion rate?

The next important number we need to define is how your website converts visitors into sales.

Your website conversion rate is defined as:

# of Sales transactions / Visitors

Depending upon your business model and your role, instead of measuring your sales transactions as your most important metric, you may also be measuring leads, donations, information requests, free quotes, downloads, or a host of other actions. But for this example, we will stick to sales transactions.

If for every 1000 visitors, your website makes 20 sales.

You would have a 2% conversion rate.

This very simple equation is the heart of any business: The number of sales divided by the number of visitors equals the website conversion rate:

50 sales / 1000 visitors = 5.0% conversion rate

100 sales / 5000 visitors = 2.0% conversion

So now we have two important metrics as our website marketing baseline.

1. Total website traffic
2. Total conversion rates

Now the next step is to look at the sources of traffic.

Using Google Analytics again, we can see what sources of traffic make up the total traffic. It may look like this:

Your conversion rate for your website marketing plan

Every company has a conversion ratio -- whether they know it or not.

Whether a sales staff of 30+ or just a website, or a hybrid. Your conversion ratio will be your roadmap for realizing growth, telling you:

• If your customers are happy with your advertising materials
• If your sales staff is productive, stagnant, or if they need more training
• If your website needs a fresh perspective
• If one headline out produces another
• If one product offer is better than a previous
• If one sales person is king or
• Which sales staff member(s) needs more training
• Which advertising source(s) is profitably bringing in customers and which is a "dog"

Your conversion rate is the pulse of your business.  It is the heart.  Everything around it is secondary.  But, most companies fail here in two ways:

1) By not measuring the effectiveness of each advertising source, and

2) Leaving a huge share of the business on the table, largely due to a) improper follow up (easy to improve through proper sales training) or b) not telling a compelling story to the customer (this can improve your responses to an ad campaign, which will add more into the sales funnel).

More about these important topics in a later tutorial.

Onward.

Notice 10 different traffic sources in the table above.

Each traffic source will convert at a different rate. Our job working together is to define how well each traffic source converts.

And not just how much each source costs to drive that traffic, but also attach a cost per sale.

Ok, now with all this information we can make some great decisions and start to talk about our Website Marketing and Online Advertising plan.

What’s first?

4 Simple Steps to Build Your Website Marketing plan

1. First, ask, “How do we get more from the best source?
2. Second, ask, “How do we reduce any sources that are very expensive or costly and non-productive?”
3. Third, ask, “What big opportunities do we see that could be new sources of traffic?”
4. Fourth, ask, “How do we improve the conversion rates on these traffic sources?”

We might start with the traffic source that has the lowest cost per sale.

Or, we start with the traffic source that has the highest conversion rate.

Another option is to look at the traffic sources and the landing pages on the website that have the lowest conversion rates, and build your marketing plan around this.

The point is, there are many ways to build your website marketing plan, and it largely has to do with your strategy.

And Your Strategic Marketing Partner is happy to help here.

Onward. Let’s move on to ..

The largest traffic sources for your Online Advertising plan

Just because your website is digital, doesn't mean that all traffic has to be from online sources. This is one of the reasons why our Marketing Trifecta program is so incredibly powerful.

But we are building our Website Marketing and Online Advertising component of the Marketing Trifecta, and since you clearly know your customer profile, it is easier than ever today to construct a highly targeted online advertising campaign.

The first place we look is:

Where are your customers?

The first place to look are with the most popular platforms. And regardless of your business model, at least some of these sources should be tested for cost and conversions.

This includes:

• Google
• Youtube
• Amazon
• Yahoo
• Reddit
• Walmart

But these are just the largest sources of traffic and potentially represent a largest source of buyers. These are worthy of a test for your offer.

It is highly suggested that you develop specific landing pages for each advertising test and measure your records to carefully track what is happening.

But there are still dozens, hundreds and even possibly thousands of other smaller resources that may make sense for your online advertising and website marketing plan.

Resources we like a lot are niche journals, hobby sites, vacation and leisure sites, online magazines, blogs and information rich resources. Additionally, we like testing resources that have good customer bases that they email and stay in great communication with on a regular basis. We look for these kinds of resources for online advertising options because generally, if they have a strong bond with their customer base, our offer may perform well.

Additionally, an excellent resource for website marketing and online advertising is social media. Not only are these some of the most highly trafficked sites, social media platforms represent a fantastic source of customers. For optimal results, social media does require additional strategies in addition to simply running an advertisement or simply posting content.
Here are some of the most highly trafficked social media platforms that should be included in your investigation for your marketing and advertising plan:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Your website marketing formula:

The 3 ways to increase your sales by more than 130%!

Website marketing doesn't have to be complicated. But as you see, it does need to be tracked and measured.

A typical approach we take with our websites and on behalf of our clients is a very simple strategy focused on three main items:

1. Can we add more traffic to our website
2. Can we increase our conversion rates, and
3. Can we deliver more value to our customers and potential customers

Here’s how you can turn this into an online advertising plan, right now.

If you currently have 1,000 visitors and your site converts at 1%, this equals 10 sales.

With resources on this page right now, you could easily increase your traffic by 50%, bringing your traffic to 1,500.

Now, by adding a few techniques it is highly probable that you could improve your conversion rate by at least 50% (by implementing many of the strategies found here), so it is 1.5%.

This means your visitors are now 1,500 visitors and your site converts at 1.5%, this equals 23 sales.

By implementing just these two simple strategies you have increased your sales by 130%!

But it gets even better.

Now, by delivering more value to your customers and potential customers, you could easily increase the number of transactions per month or per year and even boost the size of the transaction.

Here is one key strategy you could start today:

When you add Email Marketing to your Website Marketing and Online Advertising strategy, you can communicate more value to your customers, announce new products and increase the number of transactions per year your customer does with you.

Mix all these strategies together and your website marketing and online advertising plan will be a winner!